


one final shot.

by moonsandstar_s



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: (pls don't hate me), im fine, k so i cried while writing this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 01:51:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8125823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: At the very end, Alexander Hamilton lets someone else tell his story.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is why i shouldn't listen to the end of the hamilton soundtrack while im in a write-y mood bc this is the shitty result of that  
> this is so bad WH Y

_It is dawn of July eleventh, 1804._

Hamilton sat in the stern of the boat, feeling oddly calm as it slid through the water with barely a ripple, the early dawn mist beading on his brow. He did not feel as though every oar-stroke this boat took, it was bringing him ever closer to an inexplicable final stand. So he turned his head, looking about him: the water of the Hudson was steel gray, mist curling off the water, and Weehawken was rearing ever-closer on the horizon, the trees’s branches ruffled in the light wind. He looked, and Eliza’s words— _look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now_ — came to him with a ringing note of profound irony.

He was the first out of the boat as it the graveled shore, bumping to a grating stop, and his gun was cold in his hand. This was where Philip had died, holding this same gun. It was an awful repeat of history… a history that had its eyes on him.

The wind was cold. He couldn’t speak as he walked away from the shore, for fear that he would lose his nerve. He felt a sudden tenderness for everything around him that he had missed while he was immersed in his own story: the sky, the river, the whispering trees. His glasses fogged up, and hastily, he removed them, blowing to get rid of the cloudy veil. His hands were shaking.

So what if this all came to a horrible end? He had settled all things, all affairs: Eliza and the children were asleep. The debts were as paid as he could make them be. In his mind, there was a Lord, and if so, this could only have one end, a final end.

_There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy._

“Colonel Hamilton, sir— here comes Colonel Burr!” Pendleton shouted. Hamilton turned sharply to see the black prow of a ship sliding through the still river. There was a man in the front he recognized dimly, William P. Van Ness, who must be Burr’s second. And there, sitting stiff— the fury and hatred in the breadth of his shoulder and the set of his face was unmistakable— was Aaron Burr.

Like some god-awful dream, he remembered his first words to Burr. They had been ‘pardon me’. Now, a pardon was the last thing he would be granted, he thought with a bitter amusement. It was all very well. It came down to the honor of the matter: Burr must have his honor satisfied, and Hamilton knew he wouldn’t walk away for that to occur.

Burr’s boat landed, and he scrambled out, stalking up through Weehawken.

“Aaron Burr, sir,” Hamilton said, feeling a faint amusement. He had always been so careful, Burr had. “As I have said, it's my deliberate intention to have met you here. I trust you are in good health this morning?”

Burr turned his head, fixing him with a cold stare. The last vestiges of hope in Hamilton died out. There was a hatred that ran deep as many years in his eyes. “Alexander Hamilton,” he said coldly. “Such arrogance. Yes, I am in good health, but none so well as I shall be when I get an apology from you. It is my pleasure only. Finally, I meet you in the room where it happens.”

“Cease the formalities,” Hamilton said. “You demand satisfaction, Burr. Well, have your satisfaction of honor. I stand by everything I said. Can you claim the same?”

Burr, in answer, gave his gun a chilling look.

The trees nodded forward in the wind, leaves whispering like the voices of the dead. “Turn around, sir, or we may have a lawsuit on our hands yet,” Pendleton said to the doctor. “Deniability is a fickle thing in the court. Colonel Burr and General Hamilton: now is the time to draw positions.”

The doctor turned. Pendleton pulled out a coin. The duel crept closer.

Hamilton drew first, and something in his heart drew tight and taut. _I will have to do what will be done, after all._ He examined his gun. Burr, merely ten paces away, had a fixed snarl on his face. Hamilton had always estimated people so well, seeing what made them tick and break and give him results, but he had utterly underestimated Burr’s sense of confrontation.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor, “send in your seconds: now is the time to set the record straight.”

Pendleton and Van Ness conferred, but Hamilton barely listened; he was trying to still his thoughts.

_I am holding my legacy in my hands, in one single choice: to fire, or to throw away my shot._

All his life, all his failures and victories and sorrows and regrets and losses— they all culminated in this single moment between the pounding of a heart and the firing of a gun. Everything seemed very distant: the early dawn light breaking through the misty trees in a strange, tender beauty, the sharp lavender profiles of the mountains on the horizon, the hate shining from Burr’s eyes. It seemed like a poetic tragedy, to make his final stand here on the same damp soil where his son had fallen. Had Philip died in fear or hope— oh, he had never hurt a soul.

 _I cannot kill Burr._ He knew that as surely as he knew that he was to die. Burr was many things— his first friend, his first bitter enemy, the first representation of a moral that he opposed with every fiber of his being— but Hamilton could not kill him. With the thought of Heaven in mind, and his words to Philip— _to take someone’s life, that is something you cannot shake—_ he knew that his gun… he knew… he had to throw away his shot.

Pendleton and Van Ness, obviously, had failed to clear up the matter. They both scurried back to their respective places, and with an air of reluctance and dread, they began to count.

“ _One…”_

Failure: he had failed to value Eliza, in the beginning. He had been blinded by his ambition. He had pushed and pushed and pushed, and this was where it landed him. 

_“Two…”_

Victories: Writing his way out of the wreckage of a hurricane, standing in the prow of a ship as America rose on the horizon. Meeting Eliza, a beautiful girl, at the mansion, and marrying her. Holding his gun, and watching the sunlight break gold over the fledging New York City as the bloody British troops retreated. Watching his plans become larger than life. Holding his beautiful, perfect son in his arms for the first time.

_“Three…”_

Sorrow: His numbing disbelief when he had received the news of Laurens’s death, a man he had trusted more than his own life. The agony and anguish that had drowned him, taken him and formed him, like clay, into a new man, after he had held his son in his arms and watched his life expire with barely a whimper. Seeing Eliza throw her letters into a blazing fireplace, watching them catch light and turn to ash…

_“Four…”_

Regrets: The day he had taken a single step past the threshold of Maria Reynold’s house. The day he had needed a reason to say no to something that would end up ruining his life. The biggest regret of all— watching something in Eliza, her compassion and naively trusting hope perhaps, perish due to his mistakes, his affair.

_“Five…”_

There was only one thing for it.

_“Six…”_

All his life, he had been determined to write his own story— through a hurricane, through a tempest, through resistance and his own mistakes— but now, it was time to put down the quill, to let someone else do the writing.

“ _Seven…”_

Philip had died on seven. This would not be a repeat of history, even if it was watching him.

“ _Eight…”_

_After all my life, all my work and legacy, this is it how it ends: with a bang._

_“Nine…”_

He imagined he could see a door through which there was an afterlife: there was Laurens— how good it would be to see him again, after so long— Washington, his mother, his _son—_ and he knew, with a sudden revelation, that Eliza had always been so, so strong. He would watch over her, but she would not give up if— when— he died. She alone would carry on. She would take her time and stop, something he had never done. She had the courage.

“Number ten paces, fire!”

“Raise a glass to freedom,” he whispered to himself, before raising his gun and shooting for the sun.

He saw the bullet streak away. Within a moment that could have been seconds or an eternity, another gunshot went off, and then something smashed into his ribs with a blinding flash of pain that ended in a jolt of blood-red light.

 _Burr aimed true,_ he thought, before he collapsed.

There was a great upwelling of voice, swelling into the quiet dawn. Someone screamed, and the ground felt oddly wet; before he realized dully that it was blood. Feet pounded over the muddy ground; there was Burr, fleeing the scene with a look of stunned fear on his face.

“Get him to his feet! Someone get my bag!”

Someone’s arms were under his. It must be Pendleton. A cool, sharp medicine trickled onto his lips, and he found he could breathe for a moment without feeling like his lungs were lined with thorns, but that was all. He could hardly feel them dragging his body over the ground, back to the boat— one moment he had fallen; the next, he could feel the river rocking him, just like his mother’s arms before she had fought a battle with sickness, and lost.

“Struck him right between his ribs,” someone muttered. “A mortal wound…”

Hamilton roused himself, blinking through the daze to look up. When he spoke, his words felt like they were coated in dust, dragging themselves out in the last throes of death.

"Pendleton knows I did not intend to fire at him,” he said, turning his head slightly. Even that caused blinding pain. “Take care of that pistol. It is undischarged and still cocked – it may go off and do harm.”

He fell backward. The pain in his abdomen was blinding now, numbing his legs, turning his blood to fire. So Burr had gotten his honor of satisfaction; he had hit him in an critical place, after all. He had wanted to be great, but the cost of it felt like too much to pay, even now. 

The last thing he saw was a glimpse of the beautiful golden sun rising over New York city, the first thing he had ever seen of America, and now the last, before the world shrank to a tiny dot and winked out. 


End file.
